On March 28, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the "military commissions" created by President Bush in November 2001 to prosecute suspected Qaeda terrorists are a time-honored presidential prerogative or (as I have re- luctantly come to believe) another unwise, unconstitutional Bush power-grab.

The legal issues are complex and difficult, and the outcome is hard to predict. What's already clear beyond dispute, however, is that this supposedly speedy, streamlined system—which took nearly three years to start its first trial—has in practice been a fiasco and an international embarrassment.

Small-fry defendants. Weak evidence. Commission members apparently hand-picked for their likelihood to please their bosses.

Egregious errors by translators. And constantly changing rules, including the last-minute effort to dress up the commissions for their date with the Supreme Court by banning the previously approved use of statements obtained under torture.

The defendant whose case is now before the Court, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, hardly seems to be one of "the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described the Guantanamo detainees. Hamdan admits that he was Osama bin Laden's chauffeur for several years before his capture in late 2001. But he is charged with only a single count of conspiring to murder civilians, based on allegations so nebulous that a real court might well throw the case out. The government has not even claimed that Hamdan helped plot any terrorist attacks or committed any specific criminal act. Its best evidence seems to be that he drove Qaeda members and weapons around Afghanistan.

Was it for this that Bush—who claims the power to detain people such as Hamdan indefinitely without ever prosecuting them—created his own personal prosecutorial system outside the traditional military courts? A system with "crimes" defined and procedures designed by political appointees, with "judges" of doubtful independence, with no appeals outside the chain of command, with possible penalties including death?

The idea of using special military commissions to try people for real war crimes has deep roots in our history and seemed to me a good idea in the abstract. Such tribunals could be designed to meet the war-on-terror need to shield informants from retribution, protect intelligence secrets, and use reliable evidence that would be inadmissible in ordinary courts.

But the commissions proved more difficult to design than I and others had imagined. And Bush, Rumsfeld, and company botched the job. They should have asked Congress to create a few discrete exceptions to the ordinary rules for courts-martial to accommodate the special demands of war-on-terror prosecutions. But as usual, Bush preferred to bypass Congress and do it his way—unilaterally.

The president's model was the 1942 precedent involving eight saboteurs who were caught after being landed by German submarines on Atlantic beaches with orders to blow up military and civilian targets while posing as American civilians. President Roosevelt created a military commission, with guaranteed-to-convict procedures, which secretly tried and condemned the defendants so fast that six of them were executed months before the Supreme Court had finished writing its decision unanimously upholding the process, ex parte Quirin. (Roosevelt had told his attorney general that he would defy any decision not to his liking.)

The Bush White House initially mimicked Roosevelt's patently unfair procedures, reasoning that what was good enough for the Supreme Court during World War II should be good enough 60 years later, in what could be a 60-year war against stateless terrorists. But this plan ran into strong resistance not only among the many civilians who assailed Bush for brushing aside the vast changes in constitutional and international law since Quirin, but also among military lawyers and judges who resented Bush's effort to bypass the many improvements in the fairness of military justice since then.

This opposition forced the Pentagon to tinker repeatedly with the rules, improving them in many ways but delaying their implementation. Meanwhile, the administration steadfastly spurned independent judicial review until Congress insisted upon it by attaching the Detainee Treatment Act to a Pentagon funding bill adopted in January.

What will the Supreme Court make of all this? The justices sent mixed signals in two June 2004 decisions involving detention (not prosecution) of suspected enemy combatants. Eight justices rejected the administration's denial of due process to an American citizen (Yaser Esam Hamdi) captured in Afghanistan. And six justices rejected its position that federal courts had no power to hear claims by foreigners seeking release from Guantanamo or relief from alleged brutality there.

(The Detainee Treatment Act limited the latter decision by channeling all claims directly to the federal appeals court in D.C. and allowing it to hear only appeals from final decisions of tribunals including the military commissions. A threshold question in the Hamdan case is the administration's argument that this confusingly worded provision requires dismissal of pending cases such as Hamdan's.)

The administration itself, on the other hand, claimed victory, because the justices held that the president could detain Hamdi militarily if he were found by an independent tribunal to be an enemy combatant, and used language that appeared to reaffirm the Court's decision in Quirin.

But Hamdan's attorneys stress that Quirin and other Supreme Court precedents and laws upholding military commissions were written—and should be read—narrowly. Indeed, the Court held in 1946 that the Constitution ruled out placing "in the hands of one man the power to make, interpret, and enforce the laws," and it ruled in 1996 that "the Framers harbored a deep distrust of executive military power and military tribunals."

Hamdan's case is unlike Quirin and other Supreme Court precedents upholding military commissions in several respects, his lawyers argue. Three of these distinctions might justify holding the Hamdan prosecution unconstitutional, at least unless and until Congress adopts clear, specific authorizing legislation.

First, Article 36(a) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies that military commissions' procedures "may not be contrary to or inconsistent with" those specified in the code for courts-martial. (Commissions are not required to follow the much more detailed Manual for Courts Martial.) The commissions' rules authorizing use of evidence inadmissible under the code and exclusion of defendants from their own trials to protect secrets may flunk this test.

Second, the enemy in the current war—Al Qaeda—is not a nation-state, controls no territory, is hard to find, and has millions of sympathizers worldwide. So this war may well prove to be the longest in our history by far. And the difficulty of sorting out enemy combatants from innocent civilians in this war calls for especially exacting procedural fairness to avoid erroneous convictions and executions. Past military commissions have been temporary expedients. The justices should not approve presidential creation of a new, semi-permanent second-class justice system for this very different war without explicit congressional approval.

Third, the Court has never upheld use of military commissions to prosecute suspected violations of domestic criminal law or "crimes" defined by the president himself. Such commissions are generally limited to prosecuting violations of the "law of war." Does the charge against Hamdan qualify? The Justice Department says yes. Hamdan's attorneys say no, more persuasively.

This is no mere technicality. The law of war is part of international law. So Bush's military commissions can prosecute only actions defined as criminal by the same Geneva Conventions and other international law doctrines that Bush so disdains when they get in his way.

The law of war criminalizes only actions recognized as crimes by all (or almost all) civilized justice systems. Most nations in Europe and the world have never made it a crime merely to join a conspiracy, let alone to enter an "agreement" as nonspecific as the charge against Hamdan. The reason is that such charges are so nebulous as to invite prosecutorial overreaching. The war-crimes tribunals in Nuremberg, Tokyo, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia, among other authorities, have held that conspiracy does not violate the law of war.

If the justices do rule against Bush in the Hamdan case, they will be doing him—as well as the nation—a favor. Bush has chosen not to put any Qaeda leaders on trial, perhaps to avoid disclosure of the highly coercive interrogation methods used on them. That leaves nobody for the commissions to try except small fry like Hamdan. It also risks trivializing the monstrous crimes of Al Qaeda.

A wise president would by now have seen the military commissions as a mistake and quietly shut them down. A stubborn, arrogant president persists in his mistakes until forced to stop.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city of Aleppo told the BBC this week, via a WhatsApp audio message. “The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the Syrian military, backed by Russian air power and Iran-affiliated militias, has swiftly retaken most of eastern Aleppo, the last major urban stronghold of rebel forces in Syria. Tens of thousands of besieged civilians are struggling to survive and escape the fighting, amid talk of a rebel retreat. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, the city of the Silk Road and the Great Mosque, of muwashshah and kibbeh with quince, of the White Helmets and Omran Daqneesh, is poised to fall to Bashar al-Assad and his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran, after a savage four-year stalemate. Syria’s president, who has overseen a war that has left hundreds of thousands of his compatriots dead, will inherit a city robbed of its human potential and reduced to rubble.

Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.

A recent study shows that people who simply ate more fiber lost about as much weight as those who went on a complicated diet.

By this time of year, many peoples’ best-laid New Year’s Resolutions have died, just seven short weeks after they were born. One reason why it’s difficult to lose weight—the most common resolution—is that dieting is so confusing.

For instance, the American Heart Association's recommended diet is one of the most effective food plans out there. It’s also one of the most complicated. It requires, according to a recent study, “consuming vegetables and fruits; eating whole grains and high-fiber foods; eating fish twice weekly; consuming lean animal and vegetable proteins; reducing intake of sugary beverages; minimizing sugar and sodium intake; and maintaining moderate to no alcohol intake.” On top of that, adherents should derive half of their calories from carbs, a fifth from protein, and the rest from fat—except just 7 percent should be saturated fat. (Perhaps the goal is to keep people busy doing long division so they don't have time to eat food.)